LOS ANGELES (AP) \u2014 A motorist was arrested on murder charges after authorities say she slammed her SUV into a city bus in Los Angeles, killing at least two people and injuring six others in a prelude to a second deadly tragedy: the fiery crash of a TV news helicopter that was covering the collision.<\/p>\n
Bailee Lynn Rios, 36, of Simi Valley, was arrested Tuesday night and is being held at a Los Angeles jail with bail set at $4 million, police said Wednesday. The case is being forwarded to the district attorney\u2019s office, which will decide whether to file the charges in court or pursue different ones. Information on a lawyer who could speak on her behalf was not immediately available.<\/p>\n
The helicopter, which was used by NBC and Telemundo, crashed about two hours after police say Rios drove her 2004 Ford Expedition the wrong way down a busy avenue, ran a red light and struck a vehicle before hitting the bus. One passenger was fully ejected from the bus and another was partially ejected, police said.<\/p>\n
Rios\u2019 mother, Cindy Rios, said she was shocked and saddened by the string of events. She said she had not spoken to Bailee Lynn since her arrest and had not been contacted by law enforcement.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s just horrible,\u201d Cindy Rios told The Associated Press in a phone interview Wednesday. \u201cThe fact that my daughter was involved and was the cause of it is just extremely disturbing.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIf anything, I\u2019m sorry for the other families,\u201d she added. \u201cMy daughter\u2019s alive. People lost their lives.\u201d<\/p>\n
Chopper crash killed a reporter, a pilot and a man on the ground<\/p>\n
NBC4 Los Angeles reported that two people aboard the helicopter \u2014 reporter Eliana Moreno and pilot George Marciniw \u2014 were killed when the chopper went down Tuesday in the Chatsworth neighborhood in the San Fernando Valley north of downtown.<\/p>\n
A person on the ground, identified as 29-year-old Edy Gutierrez Mejia, died in a parking lot, the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner\u2019s Office said. He was from Guatemala, the country\u2019s consulate confirmed.<\/p>\n
The crash happened as news crews were reporting on the collision involving the SUV that slammed into the bus.<\/p>\n
There were no immediate details on what caused the helicopter crash, but an alarm could be heard sounding inside the helicopter\u2019s cockpit as it lost altitude in the final seconds of video the crew broadcast before the crash.<\/p>\n
Just after the beeping noise starts, a woman\u2019s voice says \u201cuh oh.\u201d The helicopter moves quickly away from the bus crash site and starts losing altitude. The woman says \u201cYou can\u2019t pull up?\u201d before the video stops as the chopper nears the ground.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat video is probably the most important evidence that we have discovered so far,\u201d National Transportation Safety Board investigator Fabian Salazar said Wednesday at a news briefing.<\/p>\n
Salazar said the sounds were consistent with the helicopter\u2019s engine changing speed, as well as what he said were likely advisory tones for the pilot. The NTSB said it is also investigating the bus collision.<\/p>\n
The helicopter, a Eurocopter AS350, went down near a large storage facility. At least four cars and two storage containers burned after the helicopter caught fire. NBC4 reporter Robert Kovacik was at the bus scene and saw black smoke and rushed to the helicopter crash site.<\/p>\n
Anchor and reporters pay tearful tributes to deceased colleagues<\/p>\n
Moreno was a familiar voice for NBC4 and Telemundo 52 during the station\u2019s aerial coverage. She and Marciniw were both were employees of Angel City Air, which operated the chopper for the station.<\/p>\n
Moreno, born in Orange County, joined Angel City Air in 2010, the same year she earned a broadcast journalism and political science degree from Chapman University. She reported for several news outlets and began flying with Marciniw in 2023, the NBC4 website said.<\/p>\n
Marciniw grew up in Southern California and graduated from Burbank High School in 1974.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think a lot of us are still trying to process what happened, this terrible loss,\u201d NBC4 reporter Lauren Coronado told viewers early Wednesday as she stood near the crash site. A hazmat crew was cleaning up jet fuel, she said.<\/p>\n
In a tribute to Moreno and Marciniw, the newscast referred to them as \u201cthe team in the sky,\u201d saying Moreno would often post videos from her job and was in awe of the view. Anchor Lynette Romero held a colleague\u2019s hand and wiped away tears after hearing Moreno\u2019s voice when one of her posts was played.<\/p>\n
In an interview with the station, Esteban Jimenez, a pilot, said he had known Marciniw since the 1990s. He said Marciniw had been his instructor.<\/p>\n
\u201cI just talked to him on Sunday. We were talking about the aviation business and retiring,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Expert talks about what may have caused the crash<\/p>\n
Aviation safety expert Jeff Guzzetti said the alarm sounding in the helicopter\u2019s final video sounds like the low rotor RPM warning horn that signals the main rotor is no longer spinning enough to keep the helicopter in the air.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt just has all the earmarks of a potential loss of engine power and a dangerous decrease in the main rotor speed,\u201d said Guzzetti who used to investigate crashes for both the NTSB and FAA.<\/p>\n
Guzzetti said the pilot appeared to be trying to perform an emergency maneuver to use the wind to force the rotor to spin again much like a breeze turns a windmill. Doing that can create a bit of lift that could help cushion the impact, but Guzzetti said there would have been little opportunity to do that because the helicopter had been hovering at a low altitude beforehand.<\/p>\n
There are risks to news helicopters particularly in a major city like Los Angeles where multiple helicopters respond to an incident, but the pilots all coordinate closely over the radio to ensure they maintain a safe distance from each other. The industry also shares best practices to help keep these news flights safe.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a very unique form of flying. And the community is very good about lessons learned,\u201d Guzzetti said. \u201cAnd so because of that, you don\u2019t hear about too many of those accidents. So they\u2019re rare, but they do occur, just because the mission is a risky one.\u201d<\/p>\n
Other crashes involving news helicopters<\/p>\n
The station said this is the second aviation tragedy in its history.<\/p>\n
In 1977, a KNBC news helicopter crashed when it ran out of fuel while returning to the station after covering a wildfire in Santa Barbara, killing the pilot and camera operator. The pilot, former U.S. Air Force officer Francis Gary Powers, had been in the news years earlier when he was shot down and captured while flying a U-2 spy plane over the Soviet Union for the CIA, an ordeal portrayed in the movie \u201cBridge of Spies.\u201d<\/p>\n
There have been at least eight fatal crashes involving news helicopters in the U.S. since 2000, killing 16 people, according to a review of federal accident records and news accounts.<\/p>\n
They include a 2023 crash in a New Jersey forest<\/a> that killed the pilot and a photographer aboard a helicopter used by Philadelphia station WPVI and a 2022 crash beside a Charlotte, North Carolina, interstate<\/a> that killed a pilot and meteorologist<\/a> during a training flight for WBTV.<\/p>\n A 2007 midair collision in Phoenix of two TV news helicopters that were covering a police chase led the NTSB to recommend that news helicopters have at least two people in the cockpit so the pilot can focus on flying while the reporter focuses on the story.<\/p>\n ___<\/p>\n Golden reported from Seattle, and Collins from Hartford, Connecticut. Associated Press writers Josh Funk in Omaha, Nebraska; Olga Rodriguez in San Francisco; Kathy McCormack in Concord, New Hampshire; and Allen Breed in Raleigh, North Carolina, contributed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"LOS ANGELES (AP) \u2014 A motorist was arrested on murder charges after authorities say she slammed her SUV…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":466774,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[48,52,51,47,50,49],"class_list":["post-466773","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-los-angeles","tag-la","tag-la-headlines","tag-la-news","tag-los-angeles","tag-los-angeles-headlines","tag-los-angeles-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/466773","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=466773"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/466773\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/466774"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=466773"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=466773"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=466773"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}